


lifeline

by steepedinwords



Series: we move lightly [1]
Category: Stardew Valley (Video Game)
Genre: Gen, joja co. are not good employers, slight deviations from canon, terrible work situations
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-30
Updated: 2017-06-30
Packaged: 2018-11-21 08:11:34
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,295
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11353410
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/steepedinwords/pseuds/steepedinwords
Summary: Jenny finds the letter.





	lifeline

**Author's Note:**

> This is the first in what I plan to be a series of pieces exploring the details of life in Stardew Valley. I love that the game is fairly open to interpretation of what the character thinks and feels; this is just my take on my character's playthrough.
> 
> Series title is from a piano piece by Dustin O'Halloran.
> 
> Edit: changed what Jenny calls her grandfather, because I like playing around with my source material.

It’s raining today.

Jenny can’t hear it, stuck in a grey cubicle in the corner of a grey concrete basement smelling of dusty carpet and feet. But she ran through it, breathing deep for as long as she could, on the way to her train this morning. A few tantalising lungfuls of fresh, clean air before going underground and having to actually work for a living.

The smell in the office is pretty intense today. The guy in the next cubicle over sometimes toes his shoes off under his desk and thinks no one notices, but everyone within range does. They’re all just too tired to say anything. Jenny is, certainly. Every day she feels more exhausted, surrounded by people she barely knows despite having worked beside them for years. The prospect of spending the rest of her life at Joja Co. turns the future the same dull grey as everything in here. Even the potted fern Jenny had brought in to work as a bright-eyed, eager-to-please newbie hadn’t been allowed, the splash of green deemed too untidy for a work environment. “Organised desk, organised mind,” Jenny’s supervisor had pronounced, sweeping the tiny plant into the trash can. Jenny had ended up crying on her very first day at work. Five years later, it’s all the same. The same tiny cubicles, the same co-workers, silent except for the tapping of keys and the occasional yawn, the same feeling of being watched all the time.

For a moment, Jenny pauses. What if, just once, she could take a day off? Run through the rain, go to the park in the daytime instead of after dark when she should really be asleep? Joja Co. barely pays her enough for rent for the couch she’s subletting from friends, let alone affording her the luxury of time off. It’s work or sleep on a bench in that park; she knows that quite well. The numbers in her bank account, perpetually low, are as familiar to Jenny as the face that looks back at her from the mirror.

Living with Andrea and Polly after Mom and Dad had to downsize a year ago, pensions not stretching to space for a third person, hasn’t been terrible, per se. The aunties are kind, let her use their stove and grow flowers on the balcony. But Jenny fiercely misses her own room, her own space. Sleeping on the couch, feeling like she needs to keep herself small and unobtrusive as much as possible - it’s wearing her down. Sometimes she could weep with the strain of living in borrowed space, never alone. She’s careful and quiet, cleans up after herself, spends some time at her parents’ small one-room apartment. But she can’t sleep on the floor beside their bed, much as she might wish sometimes to turn into a little girl again so she could. 

The thing is, there’s nowhere to go from here. At eighteen, just out of community college, Jenny had allowed herself to hope for a promotion if she kept her head down, worked hard, smiled at people. But it’s been years, and the promotions all go to people with better family connections, better fake smiles, and apparently more spare time to bring their supervisors expensive lattes. Jenny’s supervisor has never even taken the trouble to learn her name properly.

If she listens hard, sometimes she can pretend she can hear the rain pounding on the roof of the Joja Co. building. But the reality is that she’s miles below the ground in a windowless room. She _can’t _hear the rain, and she’s probably never going to get out of this place. There will never really be time to enjoy a sunset or the smell of rain on pavement or wind in the trees, because all life holds for a girl like her is running, running, running to catch up and find out where everyone else is going, if it’s even worth getting there.__

____

____

Jenny swallows hard, gulps down the last of her mug of water, and goes back to her data entry, punching in numbers and product values. She is _not _going to cry at work. She has deadlines, and there’s a camera above her desk, watching every moment she takes from work. She’s _so tired _of never, ever being alone. The sob is a huge lump in her throat, a familiar ache behind her sternum.____

_____ _

_____ _

Frack. Maybe there are tissues in her desk drawer. Jenny fumbles for the handle, pulls it open, and - oh. She didn’t remember that being on top. Faded pink, official purple seal. Her grandfather's words when he gave her the letter come flooding back, remembered even though at ten Jenny hadn’t understood them. Back then, all his painful phrases had meant to her was that she would never get to see him again, but now - a small flare of hope rises inside her. Papa had said this could help her, and Papa had never been anything but honest.

Forgetting about data entry and tissues, Jenny grabs the letter, slits it open with a pen, pulls out a handwritten note, shaky but unmistakably from her grandfather. A minute later, she sits back, feeling like the wind has been knocked out of her. The camera above her desk swivels, refocuses on her face. That’s trouble. In a minute, she’ll get an instant message telling her to go see her supervisor, but Jenny can’t bring herself to care.

He’s left her the farm. Her eyes squeeze tight for a moment, bright pictures dancing on the back of her eyelids. Peaceful orchards, black dirt, a heavy watering can, Papa’s careful gnarled fingers showing her how to pull weeds. Only a brief visit, a day or two when Jenny was very small. That was the only time. Jenny had begged and begged to go back, but there was never quite enough money for the bus trip. Papa had come back to the city to visit, often. Jenny soaked up everything he could tell her, learned to grow herbs on the balcony despite the city smog, spent hours reading library books about botany and crop rotation. The farming nerd she had been at sixteen had had nowhere to go, just stagnating, like the rest of her, till now.

Deep Hollow Farm is Jenny’s, and all she can think about is getting on the first bus out there. She takes a deep, shaky breath and smiles. The red message on her computer screen blinks angrily at her. Jenny pushes back her chair.

Walking out of the only job she has ever had doesn’t take as much nerve as she had imagined, the few times she’s let herself think about it. The envelope in her coat pocket, deed and letter carefully tucked back inside, is reassuring to curl her fingers against. Jenny signs all of the nondisclosure forms Ria shoves at her, imagining Papa's hand on her shoulder and his eyes crinkling up. Ria stands, sweeping the forms back toward herself, and puts her hands on her hips.

“Well, Jennifer, you’ve cost us several hours of productive work time today. I hope you’re happy,” she says sourly.

Something unknots in Jenny’s chest, and she grins for the first time in what feels like forever.

“I’ve put in enough overtime to cover for it,” she counters. Then, giving in: “And it’s Jenny. Not Jennifer. Not that it matters now.”

She smiles sweetly, closes the door on Ria’s disgruntled face, and makes it out to the street before the sob wells back up in her throat. This time, she lets it come, all the stress and pressure that’s been kept down for so very long overflowing in a great, overwhelming wave of relief.

There's no danger of anyone noticing that she's crying, anyhow. It’s raining.

**Author's Note:**

> Workplace surveillance is a thing that some employers do! I find the idea invasive and unpleasant. So does Jenny, apparently.


End file.
